SCREENING THE WORLD'S BEST INDEPENDENT FILMS

DOG MEN / Mirko and Dario Bischofberger

In a not-too-distant future only a few homo sapiens are left. Struggling for survival they are forced to live from hunting the last remaining animals in the peripheral ruins of an advanced human civilization. But they are unaware of being stalked themselves by a mysterious scanner. A science-fiction story about hunting and being hunted, about extinction and survival, about dogs – and men.

The Bischofberger brothers spent a large part of their childhood in Southern Italy, where their forefathers used to live as illiterate farmers working in the fields and eating dog meat to survive. These peasants were in fact called “mangiacani” locally, which means “dog eaters” in Italian. It is this historical background of scarce resources that inspired the directors to make a science-fiction movie. The rural poverty of the mangiacani is transposed into an apocalyptic stone pits architecture in a story that is at the same time very new and very remote.